Teacher Khalil (Hadi Khanjanpour) has an empathetic and gently authoritarian approach with his students: he is not feared but always respected. These aren‘t bad conditions for a teacher, especially in Berlin. It‘s moving to see him helping a boy hop over the vaulting box not just physically, but with the words “you‘re doing well!.“ The pedagogue‘s life is shattered when his journalist girlfriend (Kristin Suckow) shows him videos from his Kurdish hometown: is that really his sister who was thought to be dead for years? Is it really Senem who is filming all of the brutal clashes between Kurds and the Turkish armed forces? For almost the entire film length of 94 minutes, Khalil grapples with this question. He tries to find the origins the pictures that keep coming from Cizre, a city by Tigris, that have been smuggled by a Kurdish cultural association. Khalil‘s emotional breakdown, directed by the Kreuzberg-born director and screenwriter Florian Hoffman in his debut, mostly uses images steeped in cool green-gray. A green-gray that often comes from the reflection of the monitors and cell phones that play a role in the film. STILLE POST is also a commentary and critique of our media culture. How does agenda setting work? What images make it through the filter of the (presumably cynical measures) of the media? Questions like this somewhat overload the film; the main topic (the Turkish-Kurdish conflict) is already heavy to shoulder. The film is most successful in the scenes that show the teacher in his unpretentious commitment to his students, like when Khalil protects a Kurdish girl in his class from the bullying of the Turkish boys.

Matthias von Viereck

Translation: Elinor Lewy